If the current President were found not to have the power to use signing statements to create legislation to circumvent rational laws, then no future President could use signing statements to create legislation to circumvent irrational laws. Especially as it'd be hard to find two people to decide what was rational.
Bush has set the precedent that both a Presidential Executive Order and a signing letter can bypass or negate anything in law, so any future President can retroactively re-enable liability for those things being retroactively protected. For that matter, so can Congress, as it now clearly recognizes retroactive laws. Mind you, another future President or Congress can then re-legalize it. As soon as you can alter the frame of reference of the past, so can everyone else. That's why it's a really bad idea. Nothing is stable, liability becomes indeterminate and things paralyze. Even corrupt logic has logic you can follow, but when reality can be retcon'd at will, you don't even get that.
Alexander the Great was one of the early adopters of the idea that the fear of force was just as powerful as force itself, and more than a few of his later conquests were by utilizing the fear he had created. His empire disintegrated, because fear isn't terribly stable and could never have been maintained. In the short-term, it's very effective. In the mid-to-long-term, it is actually counter-productive as people become desensitized faster than new fears can be generated.
Oh, and 11% of the crude oil production is rather useless for a range of reasons. First, it's surrounded by countries that have a number of reasons to want America to back off the region. Second, most countries with the capability are migrating to nuclear and/or other energy sources (eg: geothermal) for electricity (for reasons of efficiency, environment, cost, stability, ease of access, etc), making crude oil of short-term interest at best. Third, obtaining that 11% has put at risk something like 30%, making the victory somewhat pyrrhic. Lastly, America's oil consumption is mostly due to waste and inefficiency. Aluminium power grids?? Hummvee road cars?? It's not competitive. Not on a global market dominated by ever-more efficient use of resources. It's cheaper to leverage what you have than to try to burn more wastefully. Scale efficiency only works if the second word (efficiency) is applied, not just the first.
Now, relying on being liked (populist tactics) isn't terribly stable either. What people like changes with the wind. Respect and trust are different, much more durable, but different cultures respect and trust different things. It's possible, but it's very hard. How many people, if presented with The Prisoner's Dilema, would offer the correct answer? It's important to understand this, if you are to understand trust. What appears to many to be in conflict with self-interest and self-preservation is, on the whole, vastly superior to self-centeredness and self-importance. This is counter-intuitive, which is why so many get the answer to The Prisoner's Dilema wrong. Understanding and winning conflict is necessary, but entirely secondary. If you have to win conflicts, your expenses must exceed your gains, and you have already lost.
Gelato uses OpenIMPACT to do the same thing. From what I understand, OpenIMPACT works on both 32-bit and 64-bit code, with most of the development going into the 64-bit stuff and with most of the interest from the HPC and supercomputer groups (which is where I've most often seen the Gelato distro). Both are source-to-source "compilers" (well, since it's source-to-source, I'd look at them more as a pre-compiler). Not sure how well they do at optimizing between source files. I'm also suspicious of linking (function calls are expensive and - by definition - that's what libraries do). Not sure what you can do about optimizing system calls, which are really expensive. A batch system call would offer all kinds of possibilities for security holes.
The Americans stole the Shuttle from the French. The blueprints were hidden inside the Statue of Liberty's torch. The Chinese probably stole the Shuttle from the Russians. They're far more rivals. Their competing ideologies are far more a threat to each other than the Americans.
...if the EU required brain "fingerprinting" of some sort. Not that it would tell them anything, it would probably be useless even as a biometric, but with world paranoia levels at stratospheric levels, absolutely nobody is going to believe that. You'd end up with either everyone doing the same and ending up with information overload (making said information useless - very popular jamming technique but only effective when you're talking about orders of magnitude of swamping) or a climbdown due to an outbreak of common sense (which sometimes happens). Either way, privacy and security actually improve.
Nobody knows the scope of the problem, because it's doubtful the majority advertise their presence. Possible, but doubtful. You only hear about those who are caught, almost by definition. This number has increased with the Internet, but is that a smaller fraction of the total? A larger fraction? Exactly the same? Since the total is unknown and unknowable, I don't see how we can even begin to guess at whether something has altered it. How could you possibly tell? Besides, look at the scandal on the Pitcairn Islands, or the scandal in the Catholic church. Less as illustrations of how abuse can remain hidden in plain sight for decades - even generations - and more as counterpoints. Can you name a single colony that turned into a gigantic abuse facility by means of the Internet? Then, what of Cambodia? Thailand? Eastern Europe? Saudi Arabia? All regions in which human trafficking is commonplace, especially involving the underage. Not exactly countries known for a strong Internet presence. Italy, Germany and France are well-known as gateway countries in which such modern-day slavery is alive and well, but terrorizing and controlling the poor and desperate hardly needs high technology. America is well-known as a recipient country for all kinds of traffic, including human. Slaves, if found by the authorities, face prison and deportation. Slave owners rarely get a slap on the wrist unless, like that couple in New York, the problem is no longer ignorable. Yes, find online abusers. That's good. So long as you treat them as far as is possible. Punish the crime, fine, but treat the sickness or you accomplish nothing. It'd be helpful if they found more of the victims, but my guess is that you'll find them with the probably larger abuser population that's ignored. (If you don't find the victims, then you're not finding the real abusers at all, merely vicarious ones, and I'd be far more concerned with people capable of great evil rather than merely dreaming of it.)
First, if the revocation process is insecure and unauthenticated, then don't blame the encryption. Security is holistic and is no better than the weakest link. This isn't unique to encryption. In fact, because revocation is merely altering a user's perception of trust, it can be regarded as nothing more than a social engineering attack. Those are old-hat.
Secondly, there are all sorts of potential problems with encryption: how vulnerable is the PRNG used to generate the key or key pair? Can an attacker exhaust CPU resources by forcing many expensive operations? Are people protecting their private keyrings correctly? Are command-line encryption programs exposing the encryption key on the command line? Since a virtual machine manager or hypervisor can see into a virtualized machine and therefore see the internal mechanics of encryption, are VMMs at the point where they can be used in a secure environment?
I'd consider any of these to be much more serious than a corp-to-corp key management problem which, ultimately, reduces to policy decisions on how to manage keys.
They're only supposed to be secure from external atacks, hence their animosity to mandatory access controls. The problem as I see it is that security is not an independent concept. Security does not depend on using one vector or another, one vector or a thousand, internal or external, technological or social. There are those who would argue that these are all distinct problems, but I disagree. (I'm terribly disagreeable at times....) An entity is either trusted or it isn't, and is either authenticated or it isn't. That's four possibilities, none of which refer to how those possibilities come about. But is total security possible? No idea, but if there's a weakness, it's in one of those four possibilities, NOT in the mechanism employed. If there's a flaw in the abstract, it must occur in ALL vectors in some form or other.
...when the company concerned knows any backdoors that might exist in all Government facilities, military centers and financial organizations that use Windows (ie: 99% of them). A minot infowar-type excursion from one or two individuals was able toput an entire Balkan state out of operation, and they will have had less dependence on IT than, say, France or Germany. Heavy energy generators and distribution points use SCADA as the primary control protocol (which is OK but nothing special), but use Windows as the primary runtime OS. This software hasn't been touched more than absolutely necessary in years, if not decades. In short, Microsoft has the power to shut down the EU if it ever wanted to do so.
But what of the EU's power to shut down Microsoft? Minimal at best. The impact would have many EU businesses up in arms, America would bring the WTO and the World Bank to bear, and the EU would be forced to back down. The most the EU can do is impose fines that Microsoft is willing to pay as the price of owning - err, doing business.
Several of the Doctor Who audio tapes are selling at over 300 dollars a throw. Given that they're just Crystal Clear audios the BBC dubbed over with commentary, someone is making a fortune if anyone is paying the full ammount. For that matter, someone is making a fortune at the more normal $20 a throw.
A reasonable savings account should let them invest their loose change and pay fines of $2,100,000,000 a year without touching the principal. (I'm using December 2007's total cash, and reckoning a decent account gives 10% interest.) Let's say that grassroots action paralyzed Microsoft completely. How long would they survive, maintaining their current level of activity, property and staff, just burning their free cash reserves? About two and a half years. That is how long they could endure a total boycott of their products and a freeze on all license renewal.
It is not sensible to impose punishments that are completely invisible to the corporation and which Microsoft might never pay anyway. Why should they? They own most of the EU's financial computers and could easily out-last the EU itself if it ever came to a standoff.
I don't know what the EU could do to impose the rule of law on Microsoft - suspending business licenses there might be the only thing Microsoft would really notice, and even then, that's not remotely guaranteed.
Sigh. The Klingons run AMD, the Romulins run Intel. That is obvious to anyone who has worked at Intel. So it makes perfect sense for the Klingons to launch an attack on a Romulin convoy in the Legalis Patentus system.
They've confused the kernel with the distribution (Linus has never cared about distributions much), the window manager and the GUI with the OS, the applications with the supporting mechanisms, the I/O with the internals, the implementation with the specification, the client-side with the server-side. This makes playing Operations II: Geek Surgery far harder than necessary and raises questions as to whether they can sing "Dem Bones" correctly.
There are many things I think should be improved, from the kernel on upwards, but if I can't back that with code of the necessary quality and with arguments of the necessary strength, my opinion isn't worth a half-rotted electron. But as pathetic and limited as my presence is, I am of heroic stature, of legendary skill and might, compared to the dross thar calls itself CNET.
I regard "s's" to almost always be a crime against humanity, names included, so "James'" is valid but "James's" makes me want to hurl. Most of this was very strict English lessons at school, where "s's" was punishable by death, no matter what the context, and some from rapidly figuring out that many rules were based on phonetics, not spelling. You rapidly learn shortcuts when teachers think nothing of throwing scissors or chairs. (No, Ballmer didn't go there.).
It should be what the patent office does, at least in my opinion, but the current patent office is a passive system for the most part, leaving it up to others to challenge, and mosty just handling the beurocracy and paperwork necessary to get things filed. The system I propose keeps the paper-shufflers totally seperate from the scrutinizers - a seperation of powers idea - and have both under the eye of a watchdog organization. I imagine the watchdog body to be primarily either people from the GAO or something similar, with representatives from industry and consumer groups ensuring the process is transparent and not unduly biased.
I am not sure the current system can be fixed, because it would require beaurocrats to oversee themselves (generally a bad idea) and to be vigorously proactive and interrogative, without being unbiased. Forgive my skepticism, but I suspect it'd prove a tough challenge even with three specialist groups.
...would definitely be a good idea. Actually, I'd have two new units, plus the original. You'd then have a pro-active team that actively opposes every patent that is submitted, seeking any possible prior art, any possible flaw, and taking in any filed preliminary challenges in the pre-patent cooling-off time. If the patent makes it through that, it then gets the "gentle" treatment from the regular patent folk. The third unit, the overseers, challenge both subordinate units to prove their points and prove their cases. Anything that gets through the system intact should be entitled to be challenged by anyone, but that challenge may be thrown out without hearing if it's a point already answered within the above chain. Existing patents would then be resubmitted but deemed valid until clearly shown otherwise by the first stage. Historic patents, no longer valid but of major public interest, should periodically be thrown through the same test to see if their granting was actually lawful. Less for any purpose of redress and more as an educational experience.
Yes, but there's latency in the system, so that the harm may not be visible within the year, and the majority of the harm will be indirect. Actually, since an invention supposedly does something new, it will be extremely hard to prove direct harm of any kind - even from other corporations, as it's unlikely they're going to be harmed by buying a new component. A new system containing the component, yes, but that is indirect and so they have no redress under this. I'm actually quite puzzled as to who would be "directly" harmed. The salesmen? Well, no, they're harmed by customers being put off, which makes it an indirect impact.
Well, controlling zombies is always a good idea. But we should really be sure about how many zombies we're talking about. I propose that Holy Water be added to the sprinkler system, and that the Senators must sit through a ten minute test run. Those who dissolve, mutate into a hideous form, or have their heads spin a full 360 degrees, should be required to declare themselves undead.
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If the current President were found not to have the power to use signing statements to create legislation to circumvent rational laws, then no future President could use signing statements to create legislation to circumvent irrational laws. Especially as it'd be hard to find two people to decide what was rational.
If only 6% of the advertising is useful, web servers can average this out by not delivering 94% of any given banner advert image.
They're in Innsmouth, they look vaguely squid-like and they're totally insane. What more do you need to know?
Bush has set the precedent that both a Presidential Executive Order and a signing letter can bypass or negate anything in law, so any future President can retroactively re-enable liability for those things being retroactively protected. For that matter, so can Congress, as it now clearly recognizes retroactive laws. Mind you, another future President or Congress can then re-legalize it. As soon as you can alter the frame of reference of the past, so can everyone else. That's why it's a really bad idea. Nothing is stable, liability becomes indeterminate and things paralyze. Even corrupt logic has logic you can follow, but when reality can be retcon'd at will, you don't even get that.
I'd trust Sting long before I'd trust a politician.
Oh, and 11% of the crude oil production is rather useless for a range of reasons. First, it's surrounded by countries that have a number of reasons to want America to back off the region. Second, most countries with the capability are migrating to nuclear and/or other energy sources (eg: geothermal) for electricity (for reasons of efficiency, environment, cost, stability, ease of access, etc), making crude oil of short-term interest at best. Third, obtaining that 11% has put at risk something like 30%, making the victory somewhat pyrrhic. Lastly, America's oil consumption is mostly due to waste and inefficiency. Aluminium power grids?? Hummvee road cars?? It's not competitive. Not on a global market dominated by ever-more efficient use of resources. It's cheaper to leverage what you have than to try to burn more wastefully. Scale efficiency only works if the second word (efficiency) is applied, not just the first.
Now, relying on being liked (populist tactics) isn't terribly stable either. What people like changes with the wind. Respect and trust are different, much more durable, but different cultures respect and trust different things. It's possible, but it's very hard. How many people, if presented with The Prisoner's Dilema, would offer the correct answer? It's important to understand this, if you are to understand trust. What appears to many to be in conflict with self-interest and self-preservation is, on the whole, vastly superior to self-centeredness and self-importance. This is counter-intuitive, which is why so many get the answer to The Prisoner's Dilema wrong. Understanding and winning conflict is necessary, but entirely secondary. If you have to win conflicts, your expenses must exceed your gains, and you have already lost.
Gelato uses OpenIMPACT to do the same thing. From what I understand, OpenIMPACT works on both 32-bit and 64-bit code, with most of the development going into the 64-bit stuff and with most of the interest from the HPC and supercomputer groups (which is where I've most often seen the Gelato distro). Both are source-to-source "compilers" (well, since it's source-to-source, I'd look at them more as a pre-compiler). Not sure how well they do at optimizing between source files. I'm also suspicious of linking (function calls are expensive and - by definition - that's what libraries do). Not sure what you can do about optimizing system calls, which are really expensive. A batch system call would offer all kinds of possibilities for security holes.
The Americans stole the Shuttle from the French. The blueprints were hidden inside the Statue of Liberty's torch. The Chinese probably stole the Shuttle from the Russians. They're far more rivals. Their competing ideologies are far more a threat to each other than the Americans.
...if the EU required brain "fingerprinting" of some sort. Not that it would tell them anything, it would probably be useless even as a biometric, but with world paranoia levels at stratospheric levels, absolutely nobody is going to believe that. You'd end up with either everyone doing the same and ending up with information overload (making said information useless - very popular jamming technique but only effective when you're talking about orders of magnitude of swamping) or a climbdown due to an outbreak of common sense (which sometimes happens). Either way, privacy and security actually improve.
Nobody knows the scope of the problem, because it's doubtful the majority advertise their presence. Possible, but doubtful. You only hear about those who are caught, almost by definition. This number has increased with the Internet, but is that a smaller fraction of the total? A larger fraction? Exactly the same? Since the total is unknown and unknowable, I don't see how we can even begin to guess at whether something has altered it. How could you possibly tell? Besides, look at the scandal on the Pitcairn Islands, or the scandal in the Catholic church. Less as illustrations of how abuse can remain hidden in plain sight for decades - even generations - and more as counterpoints. Can you name a single colony that turned into a gigantic abuse facility by means of the Internet? Then, what of Cambodia? Thailand? Eastern Europe? Saudi Arabia? All regions in which human trafficking is commonplace, especially involving the underage. Not exactly countries known for a strong Internet presence. Italy, Germany and France are well-known as gateway countries in which such modern-day slavery is alive and well, but terrorizing and controlling the poor and desperate hardly needs high technology. America is well-known as a recipient country for all kinds of traffic, including human. Slaves, if found by the authorities, face prison and deportation. Slave owners rarely get a slap on the wrist unless, like that couple in New York, the problem is no longer ignorable. Yes, find online abusers. That's good. So long as you treat them as far as is possible. Punish the crime, fine, but treat the sickness or you accomplish nothing. It'd be helpful if they found more of the victims, but my guess is that you'll find them with the probably larger abuser population that's ignored. (If you don't find the victims, then you're not finding the real abusers at all, merely vicarious ones, and I'd be far more concerned with people capable of great evil rather than merely dreaming of it.)
Secondly, there are all sorts of potential problems with encryption: how vulnerable is the PRNG used to generate the key or key pair? Can an attacker exhaust CPU resources by forcing many expensive operations? Are people protecting their private keyrings correctly? Are command-line encryption programs exposing the encryption key on the command line? Since a virtual machine manager or hypervisor can see into a virtualized machine and therefore see the internal mechanics of encryption, are VMMs at the point where they can be used in a secure environment?
I'd consider any of these to be much more serious than a corp-to-corp key management problem which, ultimately, reduces to policy decisions on how to manage keys.
They're only supposed to be secure from external atacks, hence their animosity to mandatory access controls. The problem as I see it is that security is not an independent concept. Security does not depend on using one vector or another, one vector or a thousand, internal or external, technological or social. There are those who would argue that these are all distinct problems, but I disagree. (I'm terribly disagreeable at times....) An entity is either trusted or it isn't, and is either authenticated or it isn't. That's four possibilities, none of which refer to how those possibilities come about. But is total security possible? No idea, but if there's a weakness, it's in one of those four possibilities, NOT in the mechanism employed. If there's a flaw in the abstract, it must occur in ALL vectors in some form or other.
But what of the EU's power to shut down Microsoft? Minimal at best. The impact would have many EU businesses up in arms, America would bring the WTO and the World Bank to bear, and the EU would be forced to back down. The most the EU can do is impose fines that Microsoft is willing to pay as the price of owning - err, doing business.
Several of the Doctor Who audio tapes are selling at over 300 dollars a throw. Given that they're just Crystal Clear audios the BBC dubbed over with commentary, someone is making a fortune if anyone is paying the full ammount. For that matter, someone is making a fortune at the more normal $20 a throw.
It is not sensible to impose punishments that are completely invisible to the corporation and which Microsoft might never pay anyway. Why should they? They own most of the EU's financial computers and could easily out-last the EU itself if it ever came to a standoff.
I don't know what the EU could do to impose the rule of law on Microsoft - suspending business licenses there might be the only thing Microsoft would really notice, and even then, that's not remotely guaranteed.
Sigh. The Klingons run AMD, the Romulins run Intel. That is obvious to anyone who has worked at Intel. So it makes perfect sense for the Klingons to launch an attack on a Romulin convoy in the Legalis Patentus system.
There are many things I think should be improved, from the kernel on upwards, but if I can't back that with code of the necessary quality and with arguments of the necessary strength, my opinion isn't worth a half-rotted electron. But as pathetic and limited as my presence is, I am of heroic stature, of legendary skill and might, compared to the dross thar calls itself CNET.
Use this search engine and you can report all of the positions in the first few billion decimal places that string (or any other) appears.
I regard "s's" to almost always be a crime against humanity, names included, so "James'" is valid but "James's" makes me want to hurl. Most of this was very strict English lessons at school, where "s's" was punishable by death, no matter what the context, and some from rapidly figuring out that many rules were based on phonetics, not spelling. You rapidly learn shortcuts when teachers think nothing of throwing scissors or chairs. (No, Ballmer didn't go there.).
I am not sure the current system can be fixed, because it would require beaurocrats to oversee themselves (generally a bad idea) and to be vigorously proactive and interrogative, without being unbiased. Forgive my skepticism, but I suspect it'd prove a tough challenge even with three specialist groups.
...would definitely be a good idea. Actually, I'd have two new units, plus the original. You'd then have a pro-active team that actively opposes every patent that is submitted, seeking any possible prior art, any possible flaw, and taking in any filed preliminary challenges in the pre-patent cooling-off time. If the patent makes it through that, it then gets the "gentle" treatment from the regular patent folk. The third unit, the overseers, challenge both subordinate units to prove their points and prove their cases. Anything that gets through the system intact should be entitled to be challenged by anyone, but that challenge may be thrown out without hearing if it's a point already answered within the above chain. Existing patents would then be resubmitted but deemed valid until clearly shown otherwise by the first stage. Historic patents, no longer valid but of major public interest, should periodically be thrown through the same test to see if their granting was actually lawful. Less for any purpose of redress and more as an educational experience.
Yes, but there's latency in the system, so that the harm may not be visible within the year, and the majority of the harm will be indirect. Actually, since an invention supposedly does something new, it will be extremely hard to prove direct harm of any kind - even from other corporations, as it's unlikely they're going to be harmed by buying a new component. A new system containing the component, yes, but that is indirect and so they have no redress under this. I'm actually quite puzzled as to who would be "directly" harmed. The salesmen? Well, no, they're harmed by customers being put off, which makes it an indirect impact.
Well, controlling zombies is always a good idea. But we should really be sure about how many zombies we're talking about. I propose that Holy Water be added to the sprinkler system, and that the Senators must sit through a ten minute test run. Those who dissolve, mutate into a hideous form, or have their heads spin a full 360 degrees, should be required to declare themselves undead.
Can we infer from this that PostgreSQL developers will show evidence of love bytes?
...Billy and Mandy decided Darl would make a good substitute reaper for that episode.